David Starkey: Reformation 500 Years and Isis

It’s the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. But religious history isn’t just for the religious. It deals with one of the central strands in human experience, past and very much present. The Reformation was Europe’s Jihad: there was the same violence, the same literalism in the interpretation of scripture and the same principled destruction of works of art as idolatrous. It used the instruments of an earlier a media revolution with printing and representational portraiture acting much as the social media and the selfie do today. And in England it led to the first Brexit as Henry VIII’s determination to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn turned the king from the Pope’s most loyal ally into his bitterest enemy. The parallels are disturbing and they are intended to be.